"I need a ride home." There was just the slightest hesitation to his voice.
"What's wrong?"
He laughed. "I should know better than to be coy with you. I'm all stitched up. The doc says I'll be fine."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Come pick me up and I'll tell all." Then the little son of a gun hung up on me.
There was only one reason for him to not want to talk to me. He'd done something stupid and gotten hurt. Two bodies to stake. Two bodies that wouldn't have risen for at least another night. What could have gone wrong? As the old saying goes, only one way to find out.
Mary rescheduled my appointments. I got my shoulder holster complete with Browning Hi-Power out of the top desk drawer and slipped it on. Since I'd stopped wearing my suit jacket in the office, I'd put the gun in the drawer, but outside the office and always after dark I wore a gun. Most of the creatures that had scarred me up were dead. The majority I'd done personally. Silver-plated bullets are a wonderful thing.
2
Larry sat very carefully in the passenger seat of my Jeep. It's hard to sit in a car when your back has fresh stitches in it. I'd seen the wound. It was one sharp puncture and one long, bloody scrape. Two wounds, really. He was still wearing the blue T-shirt he'd started in, but the back of it was bloody and ragged. I was impressed he'd kept the nurses from cutting it off of him. They had a tendency to cut off clothing that stood in their way.
Larry strained against the seat belt, trying to find a comfortable position. His short red hair had been freshly cut, tight enough to his head that you almost didn't notice the curls. He was five foot four, an inch taller than me. He'd graduated with a degree in preternatural biology this May. But with the freckles and that little pain wrinkle between his clear blue eyes, he looked closer to sixteen than twenty-one.
I'd been so busy watching him squirm that I'd missed the turnoff to I-270. We were stuck on Ballas until we got to Olive. It was just before lunch, and Olive would be packed with people trying to shove food in their mouths and rush back to work.
"Did you take your pain pill?" I asked.
He tried to sit very still, one arm braced on the edge of the seat. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because stuff like that knocks me out. I don't want to sleep."
"A drugged sleep isn't the same thing as regular sleep," I said.
"No, the dreams are worse," he said.
He had me there. "What happened, Larry?"
"I'm amazed you've waited this long to ask."
"So am I, but I didn't want to ask in front of the doctor. If you start asking questions of the patient, the docs tend to wander off and treat somebody else. I wanted to know from the doctor who stitched you up just how serious it was."
"Just a few stitches," he said.
"Twenty," I said.
"Eighteen," he said.
"I was rounding up."
"Trust me," he said. "You don't need to round up." He grimaced as he said it. "Why does this hurt so much?" he asked.
It might have been a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway. "Every time you move an arm or a leg you use muscles in your back. Moving your head and muscles in your shoulders makes muscles in your back move. You never appreciate your back until it goes out on you."
"Great," he said.
"Enough stalling, Larry. Tell me what happened." We were stopped behind a long line of traffic leading up to the light on Olive. We were stuck between two small strip malls. The one on our left had fountains and V. J.'s Tea and Spice, where I got all my coffee. To our right was Streetside Records and a Chinese buffet. If you came up Ballas at lunch time, you always had plenty of time to study the shops on either side.
He smiled, then grimaced. "I had two bodies to stake. Both vamp victims that didn't want to rise as vampires."
"They had dying wills, I remember. You've been doing most of those lately."